FROM T WHARF TO FRANKLIN FIELD
Over and over I read the list of saints and martyrs on the wall across
the street, thinking dully how men used to suffer for their religion,
and how, nowadays, they suffer for their teeth. For I was reclining in
a dentist’s chair, blinking through the window at the Boston Public
Library, seeing nothing, however, nothing but the tiles on the roof,
and the names of Luther, Wesley, Wycliffe, graven on the granite wall,
while the dentist burred inside of my cranium and bored down to my
toes for nerves. So, at least, it seemed.
By and by my gaze wandered blankly off to the square patch of sky in
sight above the roof. A black cloud was driving past in the wind away
up there. Suddenly a white fleck swept into the cloud, careened,
spread two wide wings against it, and rounded a circle. Then another
and another, until eight herring gulls were soaring white against the
sullen cloud in that little square of sky high over the roofs of
Boston.
Was this the heart of a vast city? Could I be in a dentist’s chair?
There was no doubt about the chair; but how quickly the red-green roof
of the Library became the top of some great cliff; the droning noise
of traffic in the streets, the wash of waves against the rocks; and
yonder on the storm-stained sky those wheeling wings, how like the
winds of the ocean, and the raucous voices, how they seemed to fill
all the city with the sweep and the sound of the sea!
Boston, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco--do
you live in any one of them or in any other city? If you do, then you
have a surprisingly good chance to watch the ways of wild things and
even to come near to the heart of Nature. Not so good a chance, to be
sure, as in the country; but the city is by no means so lacking in
wild life or so shunned by the face of Nature as we commonly believe.
All great cities are alike, all of them very different, too, in
details; Boston’s streets, for instance, being crookeder than most,
but like them all, reaching out for many a mile before they turn into
country roads and lanes with borders of quiet and wide green fields.
But Boston has the wide waters of the Harbor and the Charles River
Basin. And it also has T Wharf! They did not throw the tea overboard
there, back in Revolutionary days, as you may be told, but T Wharf is
famous, nevertheless, famous for fish!
Fish? Swordfish and red snappers, scup, shad, squid, squeteague,
sharks, skates, smelts, sculpins, sturgeon, scallops, halibut,
haddock, hake--to say nothing of mackerel, cod, and countless freak
things caught by trawl and seine all the way from Boston Harbor to the
Grand Banks! I have many a time sat on T Wharf and caught short, flat
flounders with my line. It is almost as good as a trip to the Georges
in the “We’re Here” to visit T Wharf; and then to walk slowly up
through Quincy Market. Surely no single walk in the woods will yield a
tithe of the life to be found here, and found only here for us,
brought as the fish and game and fruits have been from the ends of the
earth and the depths of the sea.
There is no reason why city children should not know a great deal
about animal life, nor why the teachers in city schools should feel
that nature study is impossible for them. For, leaving the wharf with
its fish and gulls and fleet of schooners, you come up four or five
blocks to old King’s Chapel Burying-Ground where the Boston sparrows
roost. Boston is full of interesting sights, but none more interesting
to the bird-lover than this sparrow-roost. The great bird rocks in the
Pacific, described in another chapter of this book, are larger, to be
sure, yet hardly more clamorous when, in the dusk, the sparrow clans
begin to gather; nor hardly wilder than this city roost when the night
lengthens, and the quiet creeps down the alleys and along the empty
streets, and the sea winds stop on the corners, and the lamps, like
low-hung stars, light up the sleeping birds till their shadows waver
large upon the stark walls about the old graveyard that break far
overhead as rim rock breaks on the desert sky.
Now shift the scene to an early summer morning on Boston Common, two
blocks farther up, and on to the Public Garden across Charles Street.
There are more wild birds to be seen in the Garden on a May morning
than there are here in the woods of Hingham, and the summer still
finds some of them about the shrubs and pond. And it is an easy place
in which to watch them. One of our bird-students has found over a
hundred species in the Garden. Can any one say that the city offers a
poor chance for nature-study?
This is the story of every great city park. My friend Professor
Herbert E. Walter found nearly one hundred and fifty species of birds
in Lincoln Park, Chicago. And have you ever read Mr. Bradford Torrey’s
delightful essay called “Birds on Boston Common”?
Then there are the squirrels and the trees on the Common; the flowers,
bees, butterflies, and even the schools of goldfish, in the pond of
the Garden--enough of life, insect-life, plant-life, bird-life,
fish-life, for more than a summer of lessons.
Nor is this all. One block beyond the Garden stands the Natural
History Museum, crowded with mounted specimens of birds and beasts,
reptiles, fishes, and shells beyond number--more than you can study,
perhaps. You city folk, instead of having too little, have altogether
too much of too many things. But such a museum is always a suggestive
place for one who loves the out-of-doors. And the more one knows of
nature, the more one gets out of the museum. You can carry there, and
often answer, the questions that come to you in your tramps afield, in
your visits to the Garden, and in your reading of books. Then add to
this the great Agassiz Museum at Harvard University, and the Aquarium
at South Boston, and the Zoölogical Gardens at Franklin Park, and the
Arnold Arboretum--all of these with their multitude of mounted
specimens and their living forms for _you_! For me also; and in from
the country I come, very often, to study natural history in the city.
What is true of Boston is true of every city in some degree. The sun
and the moon and stars shine upon the city as upon the country, and
during my years of city life (I lived in the very heart of Boston) it
was my habit to climb to my roof, above the din and glare of the
crowded street, and here among the chimney-pots to lie down upon my
back, the city far below me, and overhead the blue sky, the Milky Way,
the constellations, or the moon, swinging--
“Through the heaven’s wide pathless way,
And oft, as if her head she bowed
Stooping through a fleecy cloud.”
Here, too, I have watched the gulls that sail over the Harbor,
especially in the winter. From this outlook I have seen the winging
geese pass over, and heard the faint calls of other migrating flocks,
voices that were all the more mysterious for their falling through the
muffling hum that rises from the streets and spreads over the wide
roof of the city as a soft night wind over the peaked roofs of a
forest of firs.
[Illustration: ARGIOPE, THE MEADOW SPIDER]
Strangely enough here on the roof I have watched the only nighthawks
that I have ever found in Massachusetts. This is surely the last place
you would expect to find such wild, spooky, dusk-loving creatures as
nighthawks. Yet here, on the tarred and pebbled roofs, here among the
whirling, squeaking, smoking chimney-pots, here above the crowded,
noisy streets, these birds built their nests,--laid their eggs,
rather, for they build no nests,--reared their young, and in the long
summer twilight rose and fell through the smoky air, uttering their
peevish cries and making their ghostly booming sounds with their
high-diving, just as if they were out over the darkening swales along
some gloomy swamp-edge.
For many weeks I had a big tame spider in the corner of my study there
in that city flat, and I have yet to read an account of all the
species of spiders to be found dwelling within the walls of any great
city. Even Argiope of the meadows is doubtless found in the Fens. Not
far away from my flat, down near the North Station, one of my friends
on the roof of his flat kept several hives of bees. They fed on the
flowers of the Garden, on those in dooryards, and on the
honey-yielding lindens which stand here and there throughout the city.
Pigeons and sparrows built their nests within sight of my windows; and
by going early to the roof I could see the sun rise, and in the
evening I could watch it go down behind the hills of Belmont as now I
watch it from my lookout here on Mullein Hill.
One is never far from the sky, nor from the earth, nor from the free,
wild winds, nor from the wilder night that covers city and sea and
forest with its quiet, and fills them all with lurking shadows that
never shall be tamed.